I Would Not Want to Live in Magnasanti

SimCity has finally been finished (I didn’t think that was even possible) by Vincent Ocasla, a 22 year-old architecture student from the Phillipines. Vincent has spent over three years designing a city, which he called Magnasanti, that would sustain itself with the maximum possible population for 50 000 years, at which point the game clock runs out. That said, I would not want to live in Magnasanti:

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle — this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

In order to accomplish his goal, the city had to be carefully designed to sustain itself for a long time with a maximum population. Everything that was not a direct means to this end was discarded. As a result, none of the inhabitants of the city lived past 50. Vincent sez:

Health of the sims was not a priority, relative to the main objective. I could have enacted several health ordinances which would have increased the life expectancy, but I decided not to for practical reasons. It shows that by only focusing on one objective, one may end up neglecting, or resorting to sacrificing, other important elements. Similarly, [in the real world] if we make maximizing profits as the absolute objective, we fail to take into consideration the social and environmental consequences.